Marin County led California counties in voter turnout in the November presidential election, based on final figures certified by the secretary of state this week.

“We just have a lot of engaged voters, people interested in this election, and they showed it at the polling place,” said Lynda Roberts, Marin’s registrar of voters.

Of the 143,041 Marin residents registered to vote, 88.9 percent cast a ballot. Marin’s neighbor to the north, Sonoma County, ranked second with an 86.8 percent turnout. The next three top county finishers — Alpine, 86 percent; Mono, 84.8 percent, and Sierra, 84.3 percent — all have much smaller populations.

The year 2016 was “record breaking” for California elections, said Secretary of State Alex Padilla in a release. “A record 19.4 million Californians were registered to vote for the general election. Over 14.6 million Californians voted — by far the most ever. The percentage of eligible Californians casting a ballot was the second highest figure in 30 years.”

Padilla said turnout of registered voters statewide in November was 75.2 percent, the highest since November 2008.

But while Marin’s turnout led the state, it was only the county’s third-highest turnout in the past five presidential elections.

In 2008, when the United States elected its first black president, 90.8 percent of Marin’s then 141,321 registered voters cast a ballot.

And in 2004, when George W. Bush won his second term in office amid fear of a second major terrorist attack, 89.5 percent of Marin’s then 152,657 registered voters turned out at the polls.

The number of registered voters in Marin was higher in 2004 than during any other presidential election in the past 16 years. The number of residents registered to vote in Marin in 2016 was higher than in 2008 and 2012 but lower than in 2000 and 2004.

Hillary Clinton won California with 62.2 percent of the vote; she collected 4.2 million more votes than Donald Trump, registering the largest margin of victory for a presidential candidate in California since 1936. In Marin, Clinton received 77.27 percent of the vote, 86,936 more votes than Trump.

David McCuan, a Sonoma State University associate professor of political science, said Marin has a well-educated, high-income electorate that votes consistently on “all sorts of contests up and down the ballot.”

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McCuan said that in November, Marin voters were likely driven to the polls as much by what they wanted to vote against as by what they wanted to vote for.

“When you insert a national political dynamic that includes Donald Trump, along with so many ballot measures in the state, you have a real recipe for enhanced voter participation,” McCuan said.

Padilla said voting by mail continues to be popular statewide.

“This was the sixth straight statewide election in which a majority of ballots cast were vote-by-mail ballots,” Padilla said.

Roberts said that 70 percent of Marin’s voters in the November election cast their ballots by mail; the number of vote-by-mail ballots in Marin was up by about 18,000 from 2008.